"We're so fucking cooked." People say it when the news cycle cycles through another catastrophe—wildfires, economic collapse, rising fascism, another study confirming what we already knew about how bad things are going to get. It's shorthand for resignation, a signal that the forces unraveling the world are too big to fight, that any attempt at collective resistance is too little, too late.
Some people sink into doomer fatalism, convinced there's nothing to be done. Others pivot to enclave escapism, convinced there's nothing to be saved. One camps out in despair, the other retreats to bunkers or gated communities. Both run on the same core assumption: that dependence is weakness, that collapse is inevitable, and that the best you can do is make peace with the end of the world.
This belief isn't an accidental misreading of history. It's manufactured. It's useful to those in power, because a population that thinks everything is doomed doesn't resist. A population that believes there's no way out doesn't try to build one.
If we want a future beyond collapse, we have to reject the idea that collapse is inevitable.
The Manufactured Stigma of Dependence
Neoliberalism has spent decades convincing people that self-sufficiency is the highest virtue. That needing public goods, relying on care networks, or depending on community is something to be ashamed of. The ideal capitalist subject drowns alone, blaming only themselves.
But that's not how people survive. It's never been how people survive.
Pandemics make clear that healthcare isn't an individual consumer choice; it's a collective necessity. Wildfires and floods don't respect property lines. Even billionaires in bunkers still rely on global supply chains and exploited labor. Self-sufficiency is a fantasy—a story sold to keep us from recognizing that survival has always been collective.
The real question is who structures our reliance on each other, and to what end.
Right now, under capitalism, dependence is managed as a form of control. Housing is only available if you take on debt. Healthcare is only accessible if you keep the right job. Stability is always delayed—through student loans, corporate vesting schedules, precarious gig work.
Real security comes from organizing interdependence around equity and care instead of profit and coercion. Not from pretending we don't need each other.
Doomer Fatalism: Surrender Masquerading as Realism
Doomerism insists it's just telling the hard truth: Climate collapse is locked in. Inequality is too vast to close. Every attempt at resistance—mutual aid, union drives, community-led disaster relief—is a rounding error in a system too big to be meaningfully challenged.
This assumes history moves in a straight line. It treats power as fixed, ignoring the fractures, leverage points, and moments when everything shifts. The analysis is weak, but the function is precise. It serves the people who benefit from inaction.
Karl Polanyi (1944) wrote that when markets become too destabilizing, counter-movements emerge to reassert care and cooperation. We see that now: in labor organizing, in community-led responses to disasters, in alternative economic models taking hold at the edges of the system.
Doomerism functions as counterinsurgency in the language of resignation. It tells us that mutual aid after climate disasters is pointless. That union drives at Starbucks and Amazon won't scale. That community land trusts are too small to matter. It insists, over and over, that nothing will ever work—so why bother?
The ruling class doesn't need to crush resistance if enough people believe there's no point in trying.
Enclave Escapism: The Illusion of Opting Out
If doomerism is surrender, enclave escapism is the fantasy that you can buy your way out. The billionaire bunker. The libertarian seastead. The quiet little "bug-out" plan for when things really start unraveling.
None of them work.
Galt's Gulch Chile, a libertarian settlement, collapsed under fraud and infrastructure failures. Billionaire bunkers assume employees will stick around to maintain air-filtration systems instead of prioritizing their own survival. Even Sealand, the famous offshore micronation, exists only because the UK government tolerates it.
No one opts out of society. Power grids, supply chains, healthcare networks—all of it remains interconnected. The dream of escape is giving up wearing strategy.
The only choice is how we build what comes next.
Beyond "We're Cooked": A Different Framework
Saying "we're cooked" feels honest, but it shuts down imagination. It implies that nothing we do will matter, that the future is already written.
A more useful framing: we are at an inflection point.
If profit continues to trump care, if isolation continues to win out over solidarity, collapse deepens. But if resources shift toward communal well-being, if care becomes infrastructure, there is another path.
This isn't naive optimism. Every large-scale shift started as a fringe experiment. The difference between collapse and transformation is what people choose to build in the space where the old order is failing.
The Future Is Unwritten If We Choose to Write It
Both doomer fatalism and enclave escapism assume the story is already over. History, however, is shaped by movements, by choices, by intervention.
We are not cooked unless we let cynicism and isolation decide our fate. The turning point is now. Not in a decade. Not once we feel "ready."
If we stand by, those in power will gladly outline a grim future for us. But collectively, we hold the capacity to shape a different ending. The question is whether we are willing to make change inevitable.
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